The World Wide Web provides an arena for the exchange of vast amounts of information from an increasingly diverse set of individuals. From a PhD candidate's doctoral dissertation to a microblogger's update on their current wardrobe selection, different types of information can be found on the World Wide Web from people having a range of different backgrounds. Websites like youtube.com, associatedcontent.com, wikipedia.org, myspace.com, etc. allow users to submit content (e.g., text, images, videos) for public consumption. The number of individuals providing content to these sites and the number of individuals accessing this content show that people are not only willing to provide content for others to view, people are also willing and interested in consuming user-provided content.
In some cases, content distributors encourage content contributors to provide content by compensating the content contributors for their content and/or based on the popularity of their content (e.g., the number of times content consumers access their content). In turn, the content distributors can generate revenue by selling advertising space, where advertisements can be shown with the content when the content is accessed. Since advertising revenue is typically proportionate to the number of times that content is viewed or accessed, content distributors are rewarded when the contributed content is popular among content consumers. Often times, however, content contributors are unguided in their creation of content; each content contributor provides content that is of interest to him or her. Such unguided content may have limited appeal to other consumers, which means that the content is also of little value to a content distributor. Accordingly, the content distributor and the content contributor may not be reasonably compensated for the generation and publication of the content. If content contributors and content distributors could determine what kind of content consumers desired, they could increase their revenue by generating, or encouraging the generation of, the desired content. Furthermore, content is often provided by content contributors, who may not have any special background or expertise in the subject matter of the content they are providing. Content consumers would be more likely to consume content from content contributors who are well-suited and qualified to provide content of interest to consumers.